becoming a lawless fiend.


academics are truly a different breed.
not everyone has the stomach for them, sadly.


a tall, sturdy tree stands in the heart of the forest.
sun rays can scorch it, bullets of rain can beat down on it.
yet it remains rooted and thrives.
then the loggers come in.
and with every blow of the axe, over multiple points in time.
even the sturdiest tree loses its conviction.
there is only so much it can withstand for so long.


Jenny Saffran and Gregory Griepentrog at the University of Wisconsin compared eight-month-old infants to adults with and without musical training in a learning test of tone sequences. The infants, they found, relied much more heavily on absolute pitch cues; the adults, on relative pitch cues. This suggested to them that absolute pitch may be universal and highly adaptive in infancy but becomes maladaptive later and is therefore lost. "Infants limited to grouping melodies by perfect pitches," they pointed out, "would never discover that the songs they hear are the same when sung in different keys or that words spoken at different fundamental frequencies are the same." In particular, they argued, the development of language necessitates the inhibition of absolute pitch, and only unusual conditions enable it to be retained. (The acquisition of a tonal language may be one of the "unusual conditions" that lead to the retention and perhaps heightening of absolute pitch.)
- Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Oliver Sacks -


regrets and mistakes, they're memories made
who would have known how bittersweet this would taste.

perfection at 3:39 PM